This time the “sponsored” type of model takes the form of today’s most popular online communication facility – Twitter and an attempt to push income-generating schema to it through in-tweet advertising. Guess what, one of the culprits of in-tweet advertising happens to be also one of the prime movers of sponsored posts – Izea with its .  Another company followed suit with their own brand of in-tweet advertising program for Twitter users – Ad.ly.

These two advertising programs are getting the buzz lately either because of two reasons – those who are the early adopters are already earning too much from it and/or it is because these kinds of advertising model are annoying the wit of those Twitter users who are not into it.

Last Sunday, the New York Times run a story about sponsored tweets/in-tweet advertising, citing the likes of John Chow who are already earning a lot from in-tweet advertising via Ad.ly. If I remember it correctly,  John was also previously advocating about SponsoredTweets.

The article might have sparked the ire of some well-known bloggers who are also avid Twitter users – and everybody seemed to have jumped into the issue.

Is in-tweet advertising evil? Should you unfollow Twitter members who engage in such activities. Should these Twitter users put some kind of disclosure when they tweet sponsored ads?

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Here’s the story. When I created this blog, I never thought that I would exceed the 1GB bandwith limit offered by the free hosting service that comes with my domain registration. I was planning to upgrade to a free hosting after one year – just in time for the renewal of my domain. And besides, the Asus Eee Reader is not to come out until 2010 so I was just readying the blog. But it turns out that as early as now, things are getting pretty active in the ebooks and ereader market, so I decided to cover other topics.

To cut the long story short, my new blog started to pick up in terms of site traffic. And so the unexpected happen. When I was about to cover an important post the blog went down. The web host said I exceeded the bandwith limit allocated for my free hosting. And were not even half-way through the month.

So, I was forced to upgrade the free hosting to a paid one. But it took several hours for the web host to move my blog to the new hosting plan.

In the meantime, I’ve lost potential hits and visits during those few hours. Figures that would have matter a lot especially since my blog was starting to pick up some mileage.

Bottomline – If you’re creating a new blog, get the best hosting deal and avoid settling for the free or cheap ones. It could make or break your new  blog’s fate.

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Taking the other important things that we can all learn from Julie Powell, here are five blogging lessons that we can learn from Julie Powell from the movie Julie and Julia.

Be Passionate About What You Are Writing

Julie adores and loves Julia Child. She was her hero, icon, semi-god. And like Julia, Julie loves cooking. At some point in the movie, when Julie was talking about blogging she asked her husband what she should write about. Somewhere in their discussion – the niche came out – Julie will cook all the recipes in Julia Powell’s cookbook and blog about it. So she did.

Involve Your Partner

If you are serious about getting into blogging, starting a blogging career or at least wants to start blogging and you are married – make sure to involve your partner. Good if they know what a blog is. If they don’t explain it to them. Evangelize about blogging. That way, they wouldn’t be indifferent with you when you are blogging. Blogging takes time, time away from your partner. So, it is a must that your partner understands what you are doing.

Post Consistently

Julie Powell wrote a blog post for 365 days. She never missed a blog post every single day. Well, that’s easy for her because she is blogging about her daily cooking. If you are not blogging about food and something else, make sure you plan ahead and try to come up with a blogging schedule for one week. That way, if you encounter a writer’s block – you’d have something to post for the day.

Don’t Get Too Personal with Your Post

There are two sides to this advice. One is that if you’re not maintaining a personal blog, don’t write about something too personal about your life. You can give anecdotes and cite personal experience but not to the extent that you’d divulge everything about you. Julie’s husband warned her about this when they had a fight and he left her temporarily. Luckily she did not write about it. The other side is having to do with getting too personal with blogging. Don’t make it the center of your life. Do other things. Divert from blogging once in awhile – to avoid blogging meltdowns or frustrations.

Don’t Even Think that Nobody Reads your Blog

Julie thought about that. But she was wrong. At first there was nobody reading her posts except her mom. But soon after several days of blogging, readers starting to comment. And later on, a New York Times reporter interviewed her and wrote an article about her. Before she knew it, she was an instant celebrity about to become a full-pledge writer. Lesson here – don’t be discouraged by the thought that nobody is reading your blog. The fact that it is online and out there in the internet, for sure one soul has read even just one of your post. And that’s enough to encourage you to continue blogging.

There you go, five blogging lessons that we can all learn from Julie Power of Julie and Julia. If you have the time, watch the movie. It is one movie that all of us in the blogging industry can easily relate to.

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Produce interesting videos

Interesting is a broad concept and subjective in nature. What could be interesting to one user may be boring to another.  Know the pulse of YouTube users. Find out which original video content is the most viewed.  Then decide which one you would and can emulate and add your own brand/personality.

Target your audience

To help you produce interesting videos that will most likely help you earn money through viral campaigns, it’s important that you know to whom your videos are for.  Examine your audience, know their viewing habits then based your videos on them.

Start uploading videos to YouTube

Once you know what type of videos your going to produce, it won’t take long before you start rolling. Once you’ve finished your first video, upload it immediately to YouTube. Then work on another project again.

Know when to join YouTube Partner Program

Once you uploaded a couple of interesting video, start working on how to promote them. Use the power of social media. Post links of your videos on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Sell your videos on your blog (if you have one) Once you know that you’re videos are on its way to become viral, join YouTube’s Partner Program.

Join  YouTube’s Partner Program

The programs only entails three requirements from you before YouTube lets you in. If you are creating original videos suitable for online streaming, own or have expressed permission to use and monetize all audio and video content that you upload and you regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube viewers.

;Review your Work

Once you’re in YouTube Partner Program go back to your videos and study them once more. Monitor the videos pageview and traffic. Identify which video got more hits.  So that by the next time you create your next videos, you already know which pitfalls to avoid.

Now is the time to Relax and wait for the money to come in. It may not be that much as first, but once you’ve hit the jackpot, you will just smile the moment you receive your first earnings.

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“this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue”

More engaging mobile ad formats, more relevant ads, greater ad reach and others are just some of the things that the whole mobile web publishing will most likely gain from Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

Google has successfully laid out a business model for online advertising, and it has started its goal to dominate  the mobile web advertising  as well.  Its acquisition of AdMob is the start of something big, so make sure you are prepared for it with your contents for the mobile web.

It’s a great list and I would have to commend the guest blogger for coming up with such list. Going through the 100 tips for promoting a new blog though might be too much a task, so I picked up 10 of this tips which I’ve proven to work based on my recent experience with my new blog on ebooks and ereaders, as well as with my other blogging activities.

So, here goes 10 blog promotion tips that actually work:

1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas – You might think 100+ resources list type of post is daunting and requires too much hard work, why can it be just 10+, 20+, or 30+? Do readers actually go through that 100 items?  Probably not. But 10+ list types are very common today. So if  you have a new blog and you want your list post to stand out, try to make the number of items up to 100+ or even more. You’ll get more attention by doing so and will improve your chances of getting at the front page of Digg.

2. Create a Facebook Fan Page – Nevermind what people say about creating a fan page for blogs. Go ahead and create your own Facebook page. It’s a free world, nobody is stopping you from doing so. But make sure that when you’ve created the Facebook fan page that you promote it properly on your Facebook profile so that your Facebook friends will actually know about it. Then let the power of word-of-mouth advertising do it’s wonders.

3. Connect with Other Bloggers – It doesn’t matter how you do this task. You can connect with bloggers through so many social media ways – follow bloggers on Twitter, Connect with them on Facebook,  Add their site to your Blogroll, etc. The thing is, this old-age habit still works and help you promote your new blog.

4.Search Engine Optimization – Another old trick that still works, no matter what people say that this trick may no longer anymore. The fact is, SEO is still important if you want to promote your new blog.

5. ReTweet, ReTweet and ReTweet your Blog Posts – Spammy or not ReTweeting your individual blog posts is still the best way of promoting your new blog. Based on my recent experience with my new blog, this trick actually can make wonders in making your blog known. It helped one of my blog posts got into the Techmeme index which resulted in instant increase in page views – which in turn game me a good AdSense earnings. All in just a couple of days.

5+1. Sit back, relax and wait for the fruits of your labor to reap its rewards. If you are not satisfied with the rewards you’ve gained, go back to step 1 to 5 and find other tips from the DBT posts.

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But of course, you should still promote your blog posts on both your Twitter account and Facebook updates and other social media/sharing sites to get people to read your blog posts. And if you’re confident that you have made a compelling blog posts, hopefully readers will ReTweet your posts using the “ReTweet button.

So here, we have some of the WordPress Plugins that lets you easily add the “ReTweet This” button to your blog. All these plugins are proven to work on the latest vesion of WordPress.TweetMeme Button – shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted

Easy ReTweet - this is the plugin I’m using for my new blog. It let’s you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count. You can activate this plugin automatically or manually if you want to do some customization to make the ReTweet button fit your blog’s overall design.

BigTweet Button - allows you blog readers to easily tweet about your posts without leaving your blog. It features three button sizes in blue theme that you can choose to implement on your blog. The Plugin uses Bit.ly for URL shortening.

Topsy Widgets – this plugin puts a button on your blog posts that shows how many times it has been retweeted. It also allows your visitors to retweet your posts easily. What’s good about this ReTweet plugin is that it can turn tweets into blog comments.

ReTweet.com button – this is the official button plugin of ReTweet.com. It features full admin options, hide buttons on home page, pages, posts etc, option to display the retweet button at top or bottom, and various button sizes.

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Let me give a nice example. A couple of months ago I created this niche blog about the Eee Reader. I was anticipating that Asus might release its latest gadget within the year and since the eeereader.net domain was still available I immediately grabbed it.

I’ve got a couple of post put up but never really bothered to post regularly on the blog. But when things started to heat up in the ebook market, I decided to do some posts covering the latest news.  That’s when I decided to add the Retweet button at the end of each of the post in my blog.

I decided to tweet some of my posts from the blog to Twitter. And guess what? some of the people who are following me actually Retweeted some of my Tweets although I didn’t ask them to. They did it voluntarily.

And what did those ReTweets do to my blog? I checked my Google AdSense account and noticed a spike in AdSense impression for that particular blog. In fact, its impression even surpassed the AdSense  impressions of my other older blogs.

For the past couple of days, the blog I’m referring to has consistently generated ample AdSense impressions. I just installed a stat plugin to find out how the blogs is doing in terms of  page views in relation to the number of times the posts are being ReTweeted.

Aside from ReTweet, you might also want to check out the Facebook Sharing widget which was recently rolled out by Facebook and see which of these two social media services will work wonders for your blogs.

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ICANN members will also deliberate on whether to allow the full internet addresses, that is including the name preceeding the “.com” to be written in other scripts not based on Latin letters.

If you’re in a country where English is not the primary language, you might as well think of the coolest domain name that you can possibly think written in your own language’s scripts.

“This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, said, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature”.

Mr. Thrush is hoping the ICANN member will approve such change in domain naming. ICANN’s new president and CEO Rod Beckstorm is hoping that the first domain names in non-English scripts will go live sometime in 2010.

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If you’re a GoDaddy customer planning to register a new domain, you might want to try using the new GoDaddy GeoDomainMap tool. GeoDomainMap uses Microsoft’s Bing Maps in providing a map-based interface for exploring available domain names with location information included in the name. This tool will be most useful if you’re planning to start a location-based fan site  or a blog for your local business.

The tool works something like this – you type in a location first, then a keyword that you want to use. The GeoMapTool will then search for all the available domains containing the keywords you used appended with the location. The location name is either appended before or after the keyword.

If you’re wondering why GoDaddy just return available domain names with associated location, that’s because the GeoDomainMap tool will use this to triangulate the current location and nearby location to represent them on the Bing map.

When you hover on the balloon markers displayed on the Bing map, a pop-up will appear showing you some details as well as a link to the GoDaddy domain purchasing page. You can also opt to add the domain name to your wishlist.

GeoDomainMap is a pretty cool tool that serves a good purpose. You may try it here.

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